And What Did You See, My Darling Young One?
by sbgrrl
Summary: End S5/early S6. Sam in hell, in a cage. Title from Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.


_A/N: Whoops, I wrote this for Halloween and then completely forgot to post it. It's not as Halloweeny as my holiday fic of past years, but what can I say? I'm on vacation. _

**And What Did You See, My Darling Young One?**

He fell. The darkness pulled him in, vast and deep. It swallowed Michael and it swallowed Lucifer. He saw it happen, watched it like he was above and they were small, tiny, separate beings. Little aliens in a big black hole. He tried so hard to cling to the light, knowing as he did all along that it was an impossible feat, knowing that his whole life had been about the dark always finding a way to beat the dark. It sucked him in, and there was nothingness so empty he felt cold and hot and afraid and calm all at the same time, plus more until the nothingness was actually everything all at once.

He screamed. It took minutes and an eternity and his voice was gone, vanished into the everythingness of nothing. The pain was unlike anything he'd ever undergone. Dean … Dean had never told him, but he didn't know if Dean had ever. And then Dean became part of the everything as well, mixing and blending until the memory of his face was blurred and wrong. Familiar, but it had no meaning, evoked no feeling. There could be no feeling where there was everything and nothing. No room, no room for anything. No room for him, but he couldn't go anywhere.

He heard. In the distance and right up close to his ear, screaming, howling. Dying and living. Fighting, always fighting. It was him, and it wasn't. Lucifer and Michael and him, all three. Together. Not together. Trapped, pounding hands and fists and too many noises to name, a violently loud dissonance.

He ran, though he had no legs and he had no feet. He couldn't see, because there was nothing in front of him, and everything behind him. Both front and back were the same and there was no left and right, but he ran nonetheless. Somehow, he had always been running. He didn't know why anymore, though he had a sense there had been a reason he had begun his marathon. The screams, the screams and the hands, the hands came from nowhere and were nothing and all around him all of the time. Touching and hitting.

He cried. Sobbing, inhuman and childlike, echoed in the dark nothing as if it were a giant cave, a cage underground, hollow and haunting. It wasn't only him. There were other things crying with him, or for him. He recognized it as something but he didn't know what and after some immeasurable time he no longer cared. He knew he should, he no longer knew how. He cried harder, and the echoing sobs were a chorus, a requiem for himself, for all of them and he knew there were many though he was alone. Not alone, Lucifer. Michael. Fighting. They were them and they were him and he was no one.

He wanted. He needed it all to stop and for everything to be nothing again, except everything was nothing and nothing was everything. Neither would stop, or could because the world was darklight, nothingeverything and he remembered someone, only then he didn't. Tried to regain that memory, couldn't, but he knew that person was important. Had been important.

He flew. He was flying apart, a billion pieces from one master source, until he was only particles, swallowed up even more by nothing. And it should have been the end, but it was only the beginning. There were now more of him to hurt and bleed and burn. All the pieces of him started pulling back together, forming a reasonably shaped facsimile of how he should look as a conglomeration of atoms built into the shape of a human.

He stood. The night was quiet and suburban, peaceful in a way he didn't understand. He didn't understand anything, but he looked into the house and saw a face he knew and didn't know and then knew beyond the shadow of a doubt. Dean. That was Dean and Dean was in that house and he was there on the street, falling and screaming and running and all of those things, though his feet never left pavement and he was experiencing nothing in real time. He had feet. Real feet. He thought perhaps he was supposed to know how to feel. But then, he wasn't sure what that word even meant or why he was, why he existed when seconds ago he hadn't been more than pain and always dying.

He didn't feel. He was empty of all but a sure sense that he should leave Dean to his happy life, because Dean knew what happy meant and could have it. For a moment, a brief flash, he thought there was a flicker of that elusive feeling thing, a remnant. Learned, written in his bones, but unknown. It didn't last. He turned, did not give his brother a backwards glance. In his head, Sam Winchester knew he should be afraid – of where he was and how he got there and why.

But also in his head and everywhere else, nothing had stopped being everything and nothing was just nothing.


End file.
